AstraZeneca was created in 1999 by the merger of two national champions: Astra AB of Sweden, whose researchers discovered the ulcer medicine Losec, and Zeneca Group of the UK, the pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals business demerged from Imperial Chemical Industries in 1993. The boards agreed terms for an all-share merger of equals on 9 December 1998 and the deal completed on 6 April 1999, with Zeneca shareholders holding 53.5% of the new company and Astra shareholders 46.5%. The result was a group valued at about $67 billion with combined annual sales of more than $15 billion, strong in gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and respiratory medicine.
The patent cliff
In the early 2010s AstraZeneca lost exclusivity on the products that funded everything else. Seroquel lost its US patent in March 2012, Nexium in May 2014 and Crestor in 2016, when US Crestor sales fell 57% to $1,223 million. Late-stage trial failures left little to replace them. Total Revenue fell from $33.6 billion in 2011 to $25.7 billion in 2013 and kept sliding to a trough of $22.1 billion in 2018. Chief executive David Brennan resigned in April 2012 after investors concluded that buybacks and cost cuts had starved the pipeline.
Pascal Soriot and the Pfizer defence
The board hired Pascal Soriot from Roche in August 2012. He increased research spending instead of cutting it. In May 2014 Pfizer made a final proposal of 55.00 pounds per share, about 69 billion pounds or $117 billion, and AstraZeneca's board rejected it on 19 May, arguing the offer undervalued the oncology pipeline and that a merger driven partly by tax considerations would disrupt research. Soriot told investors AstraZeneca could reach $45 billion of annual revenue on its own by 2023. Total Revenue was $45.8 billion that year.
Oncology becomes the engine
The medicines that justified the decision arrived over the following decade. Tagrisso, approved in the US in November 2015 for EGFR-mutated lung cancer, recorded $423 million of sales in 2016 and $7.25 billion in 2025. Imfinzi, approved in 2017 on the strength of the PACIFIC trial, reached $6.06 billion in 2025. A 2019 alliance with Daiichi Sankyo, worth $1.35 billion upfront and up to $6.9 billion in total, brought in the antibody-drug conjugate Enhertu, and a second deal in 2020 added datopotamab deruxtecan. Oncology was AstraZeneca's largest therapy area in 2025 at roughly $25.6 billion.
Vaccines, Alexion and rare disease
During the pandemic AstraZeneca worked with the University of Oxford on the Vaxzevria COVID-19 vaccine, supplied at not-for-profit prices, which drew sustained regulatory and political scrutiny in Europe and the United States. To broaden the business beyond cancer it bought Alexion Pharmaceuticals for $39 billion in 2021, adding the complement inhibitors Soliris and Ultomiris and a rare disease division based in Boston. Soliris lost US patent protection in 2025 and eculizumab biosimilars became available, so the franchise now depends on Ultomiris.
Where the company stands
AstraZeneca reported Total Revenue of $58,739 million for 2025, up 8% at constant exchange rates: $55,573 million of Product Sales, $3,067 million of Alliance Revenue and $99 million of Collaboration Revenue. Profit for the year was $10,233 million, R&D investment was $14.2 billion and the company counted 16 blockbuster medicines and more than 100 Phase III studies. It employed about 96,100 people. Its ordinary shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 2 February 2026, replacing the Nasdaq ADS programme. The near-term test is Farxiga, its largest medicine at $8.4 billion in 2025, which meets both a Medicare Maximum Fair Price and loss of exclusivity in 2026, against a target of $80 billion of annual revenue by 2030.
